Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Passive Isk Sources

Over the weekend, I was examining my trading enterprises. Currently, I make about 100 million isk per day just by updating market orders. I tend to log on and change orders anywhere from one to four times a day, depending on how busy I am. Based on the 100 million isk per day estimate, I should make about 36 billion isk this year, which is awesome. I've started to look though, and I realized I'm not using my full potential. At any given time, I have around 1.5 billion isk tied up in buy orders, plus anywhere from 400 million isk to 2 billion isk on sell orders and associated stock. That means I can run my trade operations with a maximum of 4 billion isk at any given time. Given that I've got over 12 billion right now, I feel like I need to find a way to reinvest, and I'd prefer a relatively passive income source.

I started to consider ways to make isk that are semi-passive, and I didn't come up with too much. Manufacturing seems like it would be a bit too intensive for me. I don't feel like doing the mineral roundup in a freighter and jumping into the T2/T3 market without any access to moon minerals or wormholes would seriously cut into margins.

My next thought was just to look into researching BPO's and trying to make a profit off of research, copying and resale. For example, the first thing I looked into was a Megathron BPO. Market value is 945 M isk right now. Now the inital investment isn't too bad (relatively speaking), but what's the return on investment? I saw well researched BPC's selling for 0.5-2 M isk. It would take a few weeks to research the BPO before I could even turn out these BPC's, and even at 2 M isk per copy, that's still only 0.212% of the initial investment. To put it another way, I'd need to sell over 470 BPC's to break even on the Megathron BPO. Ouch. The market for Megathron BPC's cannot be 470 in any reasonable time. I have no hard data for that, but I'm pretty darn sure its true. The other option is to research it, roll a bunch of BPC's and then just sell off the BPO immediately. This holds some potential, and I almost certainly wouldn't lose value on the investment. I'm just not sure how worthwhile it is.

The last thing that jumped right out at me was Datacores. I have one character already collecting some, but the grind to get standings for datacores is too much right now. There's no way I'm spending my time online grinding for +8 standings with the corporations that supply datacores right now.

I haven't seen a lot of good options in terms of passive isk sources. I suppose it all comes back to the old adage, "Time is money." I can't expect to do nothing and make billions while I sleep. Maybe I researched the wrong BPO's when I was looking around last night. It still seems like one of my better options right now though. Regardless, I'm in a pretty good spot right now. I have plenty of ships to PvP in, and that's all I really need. But in the words of CCP, Greed is Good. Am I right?